Is Your Organisation at the Edge of Innovation? It’s Time IT Applied the Final Push

Chris Gabriel, VP of Solutions Management at Logicalis Group, thinks ICT has too often been a limiting factor when it comes to innovation at the organisational edge. He argues that the time, and the technology, is right for change.

Is your organisation at the edge of innovation? It’s time IT applied the final push

For the past decade, received wisdom has told us that most innovation within an organisation happens at the edge. But for too many organisations, technology and the processes it underpins have been limiting factors, rather than enablers – a situation that is set to change.

In their 2005 book, The Only Sustainable Edge (Harvard Business Press), John Hagel III and John Seely Brown suggested that innovative companies tap into the knowledge at the edge of their organisations, or even outside of their organisations, to stay competitive.

They predicted that the emergence of China as an industrial powerhouse would signal the end of a model relying on product development teams for all the smart ideas. They argued that reaching further across your organisation, and beyond its boundaries, to draw on a whole range of insights and ideas would be the key to making innovation truly sustainable.

So where is your innovation edge? Is it in your business units, in customer-facing departments, in the ideas and actions of the people in your organisation who are furthest away from the core, or in your suppliers and, most likely, your customers?

More to the point, even if you know where your innovation edge is, what has your organisation done to tap into it? Probably not enough – but that’s not necessarily down to a failure to recognise that good ideas often come from unlikely people or places (most great designers are said to have their best ideas in the shower) – and you certainly won’t be alone.

The challenge has been a real difficulty in creating the systems or processes required to capture, communicate, discuss and disseminate edge innovations.

Let’s be honest, email has never been the greatest way of communicating a great idea to lots of people. If one of your brightest talents does have that eureka moment in the shower, are they really going to grab a towel, turn on their corporate laptop, connect to your corporate VPN, write a word document and email it to 20 or so colleagues? It’s a sure fire way to kill inspiration dead.

Hagel and Brown’s thesis only works if a spirit of innovation can be encouraged and, unfortunately, too many organisations have stood on the edge looking in – held back by IT systems that have stopped them from taking the decisive step.

But things may be about to change. With the advent of consumer IT, BYOD, social media, collaboration, and a device proliferation that is enabling individuals to connect and collaborate at will, the time for IT to help organisations take the plunge, harnessing innovation at the edge, has arrived – and it must be the CIO’s top priority.

Standing on the edge is always scary. You don’t need to be afraid of heights to recognise the danger of falling 1000 ft with no safety harness or parachute, and big shifts in how people use IT within organisations bring their own dangers.

However, the opportunities that exploiting a new generation’s willingness to connect and collaborate mustn’t be lost. They are technology risk takers willing to share personal devices with some work time, or fire ideas into collaboration portals to see if others can build on them. Empowering them with the technology and processes required to tap into their creativity is the key – provided it is the right technology.

The bottom line is this. If you want your organisation to tap into its innovative edge, then it’s time to face the future. The Realtime Generation is on its way – and this generation of innovators doesn’t want a corporate laptop, email or shared drive. It wants the collaborative platforms and devices it has grown up with – mobile devices, social media and so on.

If you think this is all about pandering to a generation of techno-children, think again. You’re preparing your organisation for a new generation of tech savvy innovators and collaborators – and if your organisation doesn’t, one of your competitors surely will.

Look out for more views from Chris in the weeks to come. In the meantime, we’ll cover topics such as Business Analytics and Video Collaboration, and bring you a guest contributor’s views on data centre procurement. Watch this space…

About Chris Gabriel

Chris Gabriel is Chief Digital Officer for Logicalis Europe. Chris joined Logicalis UK in January 2006 to lead the business' focus on defining and marketing its core ‘go to market’ solutions propositions.

With 20 years of experience in the ICT industry, Chris has spent his career working within both systems integration organisations and IT vendors (Logicalis, 2e2, SCC, Cabletron Systems), and has worked for the last 15 years in senior product marketing and market roles in the UK, Europe and United States.

In 2008 Chris became UK Marketing and Solutions Director on the Logicalis UK executive team, and in March 2012 was promoted to VP of Solutions Management at Logicalis Group, where he was responsible for building a common international solutions and services strategy.

In the third of a nine-part series drawing on the Logicalis Global CIO study, Chris Gabriel explains why apps are central to digital transformation. The statement ‘Every company is a software company’ has been on repeat over the last few years. When it was first uttered it was more of a future-gazing, stake-in-the-ground pronouncement – and […]

Bob Bailkoski, Logicalis CFO, looks at what CFOs want from CIOs and how they can deliver. Digital technologies, such as big data, analytics, mobile and cloud, are now more closely connected to the financial health of organisations than ever before. It is vital, therefore, that IT and finance leaders get along. However, in many organisations a […]

In this, the second post in a nine-part series, drawing on the Logicalis Global CIO study, Logicalis CEO Mark Rogers assesses how digital disruption is changing the way businesses procure, manage and consume technology – as well as what that means for CIOs and their teams. He looks in particular at a previous symptom of digital transformation […]

We recently announced at Logicalis that we are putting together a team to explore the immediate and future impact of Software Defined Networking. But to the non-technical CXO, what is an SDN? Gary Thomas explains. For the average technically minded executive many new concepts are understood by a form of osmosis coupled with a core […]

Fred Kouwenberg, Sales Director at Logicalis SMC looks at a key challenge today’s agile organisations pose for operations teams – deploying new releases to production immediately after development and testing is completed – arguing that an automatic and transparent process, agile deployment, is required if applications are to be delivered successfully. The highly competitive nature […]

A research white paper published today by Ovum and commissioned by Logicalis, reveals some interesting statistics about the willingness to use, and readiness to deploy, BYOD in the workplace. Ovum’s multi-market Q4 2012 BYOD survey gathered responses from 3,796 consumers who work full-time in organisations with more than 50 employees across 17 different countries. Respondents […]

Chris Meager looks at Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE), a BYOD model that may suit organisations who require a higher degree of predictability over their network of devices, with the advantages of allowing users the benefits of integrating personal and work use on a single smart device. Any straw poll on the views towards BYOD […]

The productivity benefits of BYOD and enterprise mobility are becoming hard to ignore and corporate adoption is growing, but are businesses getting it right in terms of procedure and policy? Caryn Johnston, Director of Propositions, investigates. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) use among enterprise employees appears to be growing, according to recent Gartner survey. At […]

Over the past two years we have featured several articles about BYOD. Here is a round up of those posts all aimed at the CIO, CTO and wider C-Level community. Feel free to comment if you have any thoughts about the future of BYOD an mobility. If you want BYOD to work, do the maths […]

BYOD in schools, Chris Gabriel looks at whether allowing school children to BYOD is a good idea or just a faddy notion. There is an argument that the use of technology and new inventions, such as BYOD, “dulls the memory and results in people seeming to know much, while for the most part knowing nothing”. […]